As Margaret Atwood begins to mentor fellow novelist Naomi Alderman, Jane
Shilling joins one of their lively and instructive discussions.

The award-winning novelists Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman are sitting at a table in a busy Toronto café, talking about newts, trilobites and dirndls.

Atwood is explaining that she used to make her own clothes and once block-printed some skirt lengths with newts and trilobites before making them into dirndls.

“I still have the blocks,” she says. “I could run up a couple for you girls.”

We are gathered in this café to talk about writing: specifically the new literary relationship between Atwood and Alderman, who have just embarked on a year-long collaboration as mentor and protégée.

But somehow the conversation veers off in wildly eccentric directions: towards Atwood’s distant relation, Half-Hanged Mary, who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials and strung up, but not vigorously enough to finish her off. She was found alive in the morning, and lived another 14 years.

“The Salem witchcraft trials repay considerable study,” says Atwood, firmly. Alderman and I obediently scribble down in our notebooks the titles of several books on this, and various other subjects to read when we get home.

Then I find they’ve somehow got on to astrology. “Did you look up your horoscope?” asks Atwood, “I’ve got a lot of Libra in there. Is that a bit disappointing?” worries Alderman.

Let’s not talk about horoscopes, I say. Let’s talk about your new mentor/protégée project, and how it might unfold.

But this looping, divergent conversation, spectacularly tangential as it is, and punctuated with shrieks of laughter – was where their mentoring relationship began.

The Rolex mentorship programme, which was launched in June 2002, aims to bring together rising stars with distinguished artists already established in their fields of dance, film, music, theatre, the visual arts and literature.

Every two years, an advisory board approaches potential mentors, while a nominating panel identifies potential protégés who are invited to submit applications.

“They jumped me in a bar at BookExpo America,” says Atwood, on how she was persuaded to take part. “I said, ‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’

“But they laid out what an excellent thing this was, and didn’t quite say, ‘Don’t you want to pass something on before you croak?’ but almost made you feel that if you didn’t do it, these young people would be deprived.”

“I would have been deprived,” says Alderman.

“And,” continues Atwood, who has worked up a formidable double act with her protégée, “they also said a lot of people find it stimulates their own thinking.

“So having started out by saying I don’t think I’m going to do it, I went away and thought about it, and on the whole felt that maybe it might be a good thing.”

Potential protégés have to work hard for the opportunity of a mentorship, producing a biography, a CD and a submission explaining why their work would benefit, together with examples of past work and material from a project that they’re currently working on.

In return, the protégée receives a grant of $25,000 (£16,000) during the mentoring year, with a further $25,000 available once the year is over, specifically to support the creation of a new piece of work. But there is no obligation to produce a new work by a set deadline: the programme takes a long view as to the fruits of its artistic philanthropy.

What was it about Alderman that made Atwood feel theirs would be a fruitful relationship?

“First,” says Atwood, “Naomi has a big sense of humour. I don’t think I could work well with someone who didn’t. We have enough background so that we don’t constantly have to explain what we’re talking about.

“But more important is that Naomi is at a stage in her career where this can actually be useful to her.”

For Naomi, the invitation came as an elegant bit of synchronicity. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers for her first novel, Disobedience, about a young woman breaking away from an Orthodox Jewish upbringing in Hendon –Alderman herself was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household.

Her second novel, The Lessons, about a troubled group of Oxford undergraduates, was published in 2010, and her third, The Liars’ Gospel, an account of Christ’s trial and execution from four different points of view, is published this month.

Besides her novel-writing, she shares an interest with Atwood in the potential of new technologies. She was lead writer on the Bafta-shortlisted reality game Perplex City, and co-creator of Zombies, Run!, an apocalyptic audio adventure game for runners, in a future episode of which Atwood has a cameo role.

“I’m at the stage now where there’s the question of ‘what am I aiming for?’,” says Alderman. “About 18 months ago, I remember saying to a friend, ‘I really feel like I need some kind of mentor’.”

At which point, she received an invitation to apply for the programme. It was the second turning point of her writing career. The first came in the autumn of 2001, when she was writing part-time and working in New York for a law firm whose office overlooked the Twin Towers.

“I remember thinking,” Alderman says, “that there were probably people in those offices on that day [9/11] who, just like me, were telling themselves, ‘I’ll stick this job out for another couple of years, then I’ll write that novel I always meant to write.’”

She resigned from her job, sent off an application for a place on the University of East Anglia creative writing course, and was accepted.

What are the differences, I wonder, between the mentoring relationship and the course at UEA?

“Margaret,” says Naomi immediately. “I wouldn’t have applied if it had been anyone else. I’ve been a fan of Margaret’s work since I was a teenager. I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was a very young Orthodox Jewish woman, and it was part of my feminist awakening.

“I’d been to an Orthodox Jewish primary school where every morning the boys said, ‘Thank you God for not making me a woman.’ If you put that together with The Handmaid’s Tale in your head, something will eventually go fizz! Boom!”

“I thought having an hour’s conversation with her would be such a privilege that it was worth putting myself through the process. And I remember thinking, if we’re going to be working together for a year, I have to present myself as I really am, which is not a person who’s going to want just to nod and be advised.”

“No percentage of that!” says Atwood.

And what did they talk about?

“We talked,” says Alderman, “about the people in the Bible who were instructed to make golden haemorrhoids as a penance. And we talked about how many young men’s first sexual experience had been with a chicken. These are the kind of little gems around which you can really build something.”

“I’m not sure what either of us is going to build around that chicken bit,” says Atwood.

Quite. And how do they see the mentoring process unfolding?

“First of all,” says Atwood, “nobody exactly knows of what mentoring consists. It’s obvious with choreography or sculpture, but you can’t really tell anybody else how to write.”

“The thing about the written word is that the book is the intermediary between the writer and the reader. It’s a three-way relationship, not a two-way relationship. You’re talking about this third thing, through the third thing. The person really has to have produced something to work on before we can work on it. So you’re a combination editor-cum-cheerleader – probably something like that.”

Or a parent to rebel against?

“Not a parent, an elderly aunt,” says Atwood. “I like aunts. Very interesting figures. My last one not by marriage just died. She was 98. She used to write stories, and she was the first person who took my writing seriously. She wasn’t a mentor, but she was an encourager.”

And at the end, what would they each like to have got out of it?

“For Naomi to finish her book and for it to be brilliant,” says Atwood.

“For me to finish my book and for it to be quite good,” says Alderman.

Don’t you want anything for yourself, I ask Margaret?

“I can handle myself just fine,” she says.

“We’ll have a good time,” says Alderman.

“Yes,” Atwood agrees. “We’ll have a good time, and I will learn many things that I wouldn’t otherwise have known. And there's my guest spot on Zombies, Run! I want to make sure there’s a version for me, featuring a very slow zombie with a cane, called Zombies, Totter!”